What Were the Crusades About?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Many modern people think of the Crusades, lasting almost 200 years between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, as an unprovoked attack by “white Europeans” on the “Third World,” an early example of “western imperialism” trying to conquer the “Arab Middle East.” Osama bin Laden used the word as an epithet for today’s western powers.

A quick look at the historical record that contextualizes them will disabuse one of that idea. These were medieval people – religion, not economics or ethnicity, is what mattered to both sides.

The nine major crusades began with a call to arms by Pope Urban II in 1095: Christians in western Europe were answering a plea from the Greek Orthodox Byzantine Empire, whose army had been defeated by the Seljuk Turks in 1071 and was in danger of collapse. The pope also wanted to regain Jerusalem from the Muslims, who had conquered it from Byzantium in 637.

Jewish communities in the region favoured the Muslims, who were less hostile to them than the Christians were. In fact, on their way to the Middle East, the Crusaders in 1096 massacred Jews in France, the Rhineland and in central Europe.

Jews were perceived as just as much an enemy as Muslims and thousands were killed. It is estimated that one quarter of the Jewish population of Germany and northern France perished. When Jerusalem was taken in 1099, all its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants were killed.

The Catholic Crusaders set up a number of feudal statelets in Antioch, Galilee, Jerusalem, Tripoli and elsewhere, in what are now Israel, Lebanon and Syria. The Muslim general Saladin reconquered much of the Christian-held territory in the 12th century. The last Crusade took place in 1271–1272, and the last Crusader holdout, at Acre, fell in 1291.

In reality, the Crusades were just another chapter or two in the continuous Christian-Muslim religious warfare that had begun almost from the time of Islam’s founder, Muhammad. The Muslim Arabs had already been fighting the Greek Orthodox Byzantines in the east, and the Roman Catholic Christians in Iberia, for centuries. Most of what are today Spain and Portugal were Muslim Arab al-Andalus for hundreds of years, with the peninsula slowly retaken by Christian kingdoms, and the last Muslim state, Granada, subjugated in 1492.

In any case, even in the Middle Ages, Anatolia (modern Turkey), the Levant (Palestine and Syria), and even Mesopotamia, weren’t distant lands, like far-off India or China. Nor were they “exotic” or “strange” – this area is after all the birthplace of Christianity! Europeans probably knew more about the geography and landscape of the “Holy Land” from their Bibles and religious instruction than about neighbouring countries.

The Crusading Franks and Germans were, from their perspective, simply reclaiming what had been lost to Arab armies over time. And the losses had been ongoing for centuries, as the Arabs and then Seljuk Turks nibbled away at the Byzantine Empire and seized many islands in the Mediterranean – even Sicily for a time.

This wasn’t the same as Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes turning up “out of nowhere” in the Americas and destroying the Aztec Empire, or Portuguese sailors arriving in India, the East Indies and Japan. In any case, the various Muslim polities were at the time stronger than their European counterparts (which is why the Latin kingdoms didn’t survive).

And of course not long after the Crusades had ended, a new Muslim power, the Ottoman Turks, arrived. In 1396, at the Battle of Nicopolis in Bulgaria, the Ottomans crushed a pan-European crusading force and continued their advance into the Balkans. By 1453 they had extinguished the Byzantine Empire and for centuries ruled over much of Europe, twice almost capturing Vienna.

In 1600 the Muslim states of Ottoman Turkey, Safavid Persia, and Mughal India were, along with China, the most powerful empires in the world. The western Europeans only began to pull ahead of them following their conquests in the Americas and in South and Southeast Asia over the next three centuries.